


broken bones and promises

by unwindmyself



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Coping, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Female Friendship, Gen, Post-Season/Series 02, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Reconciliation, Romantic Friendship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-15
Updated: 2015-07-15
Packaged: 2018-04-09 11:17:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,838
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4346540
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unwindmyself/pseuds/unwindmyself
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jemma visits Bobbi in the aftermath of everything, and maybe they're the best ones to understand what the other is thinking right now and maybe they're not but they're going to try.</p>
            </blockquote>





	broken bones and promises

“Hey, Bobbi,” Jemma says softly, stepping into the medical pod.  “How are you feeling?”

Bobbi lifts her head just slightly off her pillow and attempts a smile.  “Pretty shitty,” she replies.  There’s a new, comforting note of wryness, though, which might be a good sign.

“I’m sorry,” Jemma whispers, and she’s quiet enough about it that she’s not even sure if Bobbi hears.  A few moments pass before she turns her tone bright and asks, “Can I get you anything?”

A beat.  “Sit with me,” Bobbi says.  “Not as my doctor.”  As her friend, perhaps.

There’s a reason Jemma hasn’t done this much yet - guilt, mainly, or fear, or nerves - but she’d be more awkward to ignore the request now it’s been made.  So she tries for a smile of her own and pulls a chair up beside Bobbi’s bed.

“We haven’t talked much,” Bobbi says softly.

Since everything went upside down.  There have always been meanings in Bobbi’s pauses,  but there are more hiding between her current short sentences.  Jemma chews on her bottom lip.  “It’s been hard,” she says.  “With everything that happened.  I’m sorry I knocked you out.”  That’s a good place to start, anyway.

“I’m not,” Bobbi says.  “You didn’t know.  You were trying to protect your team.  And doing a pretty good job of it.”

“Fat lot of good it did in the end,” Jemma says bitterly.

“You didn’t know,” Bobbi repeats.

Jemma shakes her head and finally she looks Bobbi in the eye for a moment.  “Not knowing is no excuse,” she says.  “At the day’s end, you were, are, still a part of my team, and it’s my fault this happened to you, and I’m sick about it.”  It’s a tangent from her original point but she can’t keep from saying it.

“Simmons,” Bobbi says firmly.  “Jemma.  You’re the one who saved my life.  What are you talking about?”

“I killed Sunil Bakshi,” Jemma whispers.  “I killed Sunil Bakshi because I was trying to kill Grant Ward and failed.”

Bobbi is silent, but her eyebrow does raise.

“It wasn’t an impulse decision,” Jemma continues.  “It was for what he did to Fitz,  to Skye, to May, to Victoria Hand and Eric Koenig.”

She doesn’t include herself, Bobbi notices.  And she frowns, searching Jemma’s face.  The younger woman isn’t even trying to mask her emotions, which means it’s serious.

“You’re a good person,” Bobbi says.

“Excuse me?” Jemma asks, taken aback.

“Ward’s a fucking psycho,” Bobbi replies.  “But he didn’t manipulate May or Skye or, hell, Kara, he didn’t kill Victoria or Koenig or try to kill Fitz or you or me, he didn’t do any of that because of anything you did or didn’t do.”  She takes a deep breath.  “A bad person tries to put the blame on someone else who didn’t act.  A realistic person puts the blame on who did act.  And sometimes, a good person tries to shoulder it all themselves.”

“Thank you,” Jemma whispers.  “But do good people commit murder?”

“Sometimes,” Bobbi says.

“Bakshi was a horrible man,” Jemma says softly.  “He was.  I’m not sorry he’s gone, but I… it was something Fitz said, that that’s what makes us different, we’re not murderers.  That’s not true anymore for me.”

“That doesn’t make you a bad person,” Bobbi says.

“But the fact that I murdered the wrong person, doesn’t that?” Jemma asks, sounding desperate.  “I tried to kill Ward and I killed someone else instead and because I didn’t kill Ward, because of that he nearly killed you.  That’s on me.”

“No, it isn’t,” Bobbi insists.  “You can’t think like that, not in this life especially.”

Jemma’s quiet for a moment.  “You took a bullet for Hunter,” she says, the implication being _isn’t that the same?_

“So I’m selfish,” Bobbi replies, brushing it off.  “I didn’t want to watch him die on my account.”

“There’s more to it than that,” Jemma murmurs.  “I… I mean, with Fitz…”

“You saved his life and you saved mine,” Bobbi declares.  “And whatever else happened to lead up to it isn’t your fault.”  She glances away.  “Maybe you’ve hurt people when you didn’t mean to, but when you try to you do nothing but good.  You mean well.”

Jemma nearly bursts into tears, and through her sniffling attempts not to do she exclaims, “Here I am getting all hopelessly overwrought when I ought to be cheering you up or something.”

Bobbi eyes Jemma wryly.  “I hope we’re still friends,” she says.  “And I’d really rather my friends not feel like they have to fib just to make me feel better, okay?”  Jemma’s eyes are averted, so Bobbi raises her voice as authoritatively as she can manage right now and adds, “Hey.  Look at me, Jemma.”

Gulping, Jemma does.

“I know you’ve been taking all of this stuff pretty hard,” Bobbi says.  “I know you’ve been having a shitty year, and yeah, we all have, but you internalize like hell and unlike some of us you don’t have years of dealing with this under your belt.”

“You’d think they’d have had a mandatory personal psychological care course at the Academy,” Jemma cracks even though it’s not really that funny.

“Well, maybe someday you can get that off the ground,” Bobbi suggests.  “Look, what I’m getting at right now is, despite the way it sorta goes against my telling you not to feel responsible for everything, _I_ feel responsible for _you_.  If you wanna talk our shit out, I wanna talk our shit out.  It’ll make me feel better.”

This is more than she’s spoken without stopping in days, and by the end of those sentences her throat has gone a bit hoarse.  Without thinking, Jemma grabs a nearby glass of water and lifts it to Bobbi’s lips.  Bobbi raises her eyebrow and Jemma retorts, “We’re responsible for each other.  If we’re still friends, of course.”

Bobbi drinks.

“Which is to say,” Jemma murmurs, “I’d like that.  Officially.  Goodness knows you’ve been about the only one in my corner so much of the time.”

“You deserve that,” Bobbi says.  “I know how lonely this can be.  How easy it can be to get lost in what you think you have to do, or what people think you’ve done.”

Jemma reaches out to touch Bobbi’s arm.  She’s kicking herself for sitting on Bobbi’s more injured side: she’d take Bobbi’s left hand no question but the right is still recovering from psycho Ward’s psycho needle torture.  “Do you need to say anything?” she asks.

“I shouldn’t,” Bobbi mumbles.  “It goes against everything I told the sick fuck and his sad broken doll.  I made the right call, and I’d make it again, but I still feel…”

“What call?” Jemma prompts. 

Bobbi laughs humorlessly.  “Kara got taken by Hydra because, unbeknownst to me, she was crashing at a safe house I gave up to the top brass,” she says.  “I could’ve either given that up or a location I knew had multiple agents.  Bakshi told the Joker and Harley when they mindfucked him.  That’s why they got me.”  She rolls her eyes.  “To torture me till I apologized.”

Jemma snorts.  “Grant ‘mistakes were made’ Ward thought he had the right to torture an apology out of you?” she crows.

Bobbi laughs too.  “‘Mistakes were made’?” she echoes.  “Holy Christ.”

“Having the utter gall to say he regretted losing our so-called family more than he regretted the myriad things, including attempted murder, he did to personally destroy it,” Jemma mutters.

“He’s a sick fuck,” Bobbi agrees.  “But that’s kind of what I’m… I don’t know.  Hung up on.”

“What’s that?” Jemma asks, though it’s somewhat clear.

“I don’t feel guilty for getting her caught, or even for what they did to her,” Bobbi says softly.  “But when Whitehall got killed, we should have gotten a hold of her.  We should have been the one to help her get herself back.  That’s how it’s supposed to go.”

“You wish you could have gotten to her instead of Ward,” Jemma summarizes.  “I understand that.  It could all have gone a different way if he hadn’t gotten to lay his evil, meddling hands on her and twist everything about.”

“It’s stupid,” Bobbi murmurs.  “I mean, it’s not like I haven’t seen hate in someone’s eyes before, especially aimed at me.  That’s normal.  God knows, it’s normal.”  She shrugs sheepishly, winces with the effort.  “But it was like he’d poured all of the hate he was capable of into her and aimed it at me.  That sounds poetic and dumb, but it’s true.”

“I’m sorry,” Jemma whispers.  “He’s horrible, he’s a horrible man, and he’s more capable of twisting things around to hurt people than anyone I’ve ever known, like he can hit on your worst anxieties even without having had any way of knowing that he’s done.”

Weakly, Bobbi waggles the fingers of her right hand.  “And with knowing full well, too,” she says.  “That hurt.  Still hurts, if I’m being honest.  But I think that venom in Kara hurt worse.  She had every right to resent me, and hell, she had every right to hate me.  But that...”

“After I killed Bakshi, and Ward saw, I thought he was going to kill me in turn,” Jemma confides.  “I was ready for it.  I expected it, even felt like maybe it was the right next thing to happen.  But all he did was shake his head and tell me I’d changed, like he was so disappointed.  It was the exact thing Fitz had yelled at me not weeks prior.  I’d changed, like it was some horrible crime that everything that had happened had made me different, made me more scared and more capable of doing horrible things.”

“Finding those buttons to push,” Bobbi agrees.  “Seeing all the hate in Kara’s eyes was like seeing all the hate that maybe I felt like I deserve, for what I did to her or maybe what we all did to you.  Betrayal in its most absolute form.  And he had her so _goddamn_ brainwashed that nothing I said or did could make it better.”

Jemma’s quiet a long moment.  “Kara can’t forgive you now, but I do,” she finally says.  “You thought you were doing the right thing, even if it wasn’t entirely, and you didn’t _want_ to hurt anyone.  You didn’t.  When it came to that, you saved Hunter’s life.  Before that you saved mine.  You wanted to save Skye’s.  You’re a good person, too.”

“You’re sweet, Simmons,” Bobbi says.  “I’d disagree with you if you didn’t mean so well and if I didn’t expect it to send us off insisting the other one of us is better than we think, really.  That could go on for hours.”

“It could,” Jemma agrees with a chuckle.  “I admire you for having the presence of mind to know that, I’d probably just dally around at it awhile anyway.”

“Truce, then?” Bobbi asks.  “We’re both gonna be okay, one way or another.”

“Truce.”


End file.
